Chapter 4. Interface Overview

The Welcome Screen

The Welcome Screen is the first thing you see when you start
KSudoku or use the toolbar or menu to request a new game.
It has a list of all the puzzle types and sizes and you can
click on one of them to make a selection.

If you click the button marked Enter In A Puzzle, an empty board
of the selected type and size appears. Here you can use the mouse
or keyboard to enter in a puzzle from another source, such as
a newspaper. When you have finished, use the Check action, on
toolbar or menu, to check the puzzle. It should have just one
solution. If so, you can start solving the puzzle or perhaps
get KSudoku to solve it. If there is no solution or more
than one solution, it probably means you have made a data-entry
error somewhere.

If you click the button marked Generate A Puzzle, KSudoku
will display a board with some squares already filled in. It
is up to you to fill in the rest.

Before you generate a puzzle, check that the settings of the
Difficulty and Symmetry
buttons are to your liking. You can change them during a game, but
then they will have no effect until the next puzzle is
generated.

Note

If you cannot see the Difficulty and Symmetry
buttons, use the Settings → Show Statusbar
menu item to make sure that the statusbar is
visible.

The Difficulty button provides six levels of difficulty, from
Very Easy up to Hard,
Diabolical and Unlimited. The easier
levels may take a few minutes to solve on a 9x9 board. The
Hard and Diabolical levels may take an hour or so and are
intended to be equivalent to difficult grades appearing in
newspapers. Samurai puzzles and 16x16 or 25x25 sizes of
puzzles will take longer to solve, simply because there are
more rows, columns and blocks and more squares to fill in.

The Diabolical level typically requires one or more guesses,
with backtracking if you guess wrong. Lower levels can usually
be solved by logic alone. The Unlimited level has no limits
on the number of guesses required, how soon the first guess
is needed or how complex the logic might be. It is provided
for the interest of expert players, but tends to generate
uninteresting 'inhuman' puzzles and is not recommended for
general use.

The Symmetry button provides seven types of symmetry, including
No Symmetry. This controls the layout and appearance of the
squares that are filled in at the start of a puzzle and has
mainly aesthetic effect, except that puzzles with no symmetry
tend to be slightly harder than those with high symmetry and
it is less likely that KSudoku can generate a puzzle with
high difficulty and high symmetry combined.